Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement

Abstract

explains stereotype as a visual concept as well as the historical inheritance of stereotyping in comics. Several well-chosen examples of El Rassi’s use of Arab stereotypes for purposes of subversion illustrate Køhlert’s analysis, including one in which El Rassi has placed his own headshot within a newspaper page filled with 9/11 terrorists, asking, “Could the average American distinguish me from a Muslim terrorist?” (Figure 5.7). Some readers may resist Køhlert’s more psychoanalytic analysis of the work of Phoebe Gloeckner. Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and The Diary of a Teenage Girl have received a fair amount of scholarly attention previously, including an analysis in Chute’s Graphic Women, of which Køhlert states, “[Chute’s] reading stops short of fully exploring the resonance between comics form and theoretical work on the representation and working through of trauma” (p. 56). I found Køhlert’s subsequent attempt to do so less convincing than Chute’s, which focuses on Gloeckner’s representations of female bodies and the agency of her own female body, rather than on the scenes of abuse that are Køhlert’s focus (even as some of the same images are discussed by both). Køhlert wants to prove that the autobiographical comics form is uniquely well suited to negotiate individual experiences of embodiment. At times, he sets text narratives, photography, and even motion pictures against autobiographical comics as less able to convey the intimacies and instabilities of embodied experience, a claim that many media scholars may find problematic. However, that argument should not invalidate the many insights into the analyses of the individual works presented. The affordances of the comics form—the ability to shift and juxtapose temporalities, the combination of image and word, the intimacy of being hand drawn—are all compelling reasons for readers and scholars to engage further with its genres. Accessible both to those with a developed interest in comics and those newly curious, I hope Køhlert’s book succeeds in drawing more scholarly and pedagogical attention to these challenging and engaging works.